HEXED

Epilogue: Two Drumsticks

She showed up, as promised, without warning, sweeping into the royal breakfast hall like she'd never once left, and dropped a plate down in front of the King of the realm with all the ceremony of a woman who still, on some deep and stubborn level, considered herself far too important for this job.

"Breakfast," Wren announced. "Two drumsticks, eggs, and considerably better manners than the last time I served you this."

Alaric looked up from his morning correspondence with the particular, delighted surprise of a man who'd been secretly hoping for exactly this interruption. "You're back."

"Told you I would be. Don't get used to the service, this is a one-time courtesy visit."

"Mm." He reached for his fork just as a small scroll slipped off the edge of the table, tumbling to the floor, and he bent to retrieve it with a put-upon sigh about the state of his own paperwork.

In the half-second his head was below the table, Wren's hand moved fast, easy, practiced — the same quiet sleight that had once emptied merchants' coin purses without them ever noticing the weight change — and one drumstick vanished off his plate and into her sleeve before he'd even fully straightened back up.

"Here we are," he said, setting the scroll aside and reaching for his fork again, entirely unaware.

He looked down at his plate.

He looked up at her.

"I had two drumsticks."

"You had one," Wren said, examining her own fingernails with tremendous, unconvincing innocence.

"I distinctly remember two. I *counted* them, Wren, I was looking forward to them specifically."

"Old age," she said sadly, shaking her head, "really does start playing tricks on a man's memory. It's very common. Terribly common. You should see a physician about it."

"I am *twenty-six.*"

"Twenty-six going on eighty, apparently, if you can't keep track of your own poultry."

He narrowed his eyes at her, the exact expression of a man who suspected he was being handled and couldn't quite locate the mechanism, and bent down again — this time to retrieve a napkin that had drifted to the floor in the small commotion — muttering something about counting his own breakfast from now on before anyone got near it.

Wren's hand moved again, quick and unbothered, and by the time his head came back up, his plate held nothing at all but a faint, greasy shine where breakfast had briefly, gloriously existed.

Alaric stared down at the empty plate for a long, silent moment.

He looked up at Wren, who had adopted an expression of such profound, wide-eyed innocence that it would have fooled absolutely no one who'd spent even a single week in her company.

"WREN!"

"Yes, Your Majesty?" she said sweetly, already backing toward the door with a drumstick in each hand and the unmistakable look of a woman who had never once regretted a single con in her entire life.

"Get. Back. Here."

"Can't," she called over her shoulder, already halfway down the hall, laughing in a way that echoed off every stone in that castle like it belonged there. "Places to be, wrongs to right, kings to torment. You know how it is!"

Behind her, she heard him laugh — really laugh, loud and unguarded and entirely undignified for a reigning monarch — and decided, privately, that of all the cons she'd ever run in her life, this one remained, without question, her favorite.